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Fulton Street Transit Center

Begun after the tragedy of September 11th, the Fulton Street Transit Center was designed to be a grand transit station in the heart of Lower Manhattan. The facility is to connect 12 subway lines and make room for 23,000 square feet of retail space within a soaring glass dome. In addition, it will help make the individual stations and trains served by the center less congested, as well as make their connections less circuitous and more accessible to those with disabilities. The project received $750 million of the $20 billion that was pledged towards the recovery of Lower Manhattan by the Federal Government. In order to proceed, numerous properties were acquired by the MTA and 145 businesses were displaced, some by eminent domain.

The current budget for the project, however, is now over $900 million, reflecting an increase in construction costs as well as increased costs to acquire the necessary real estate. In addition, the scheduled completion of the project has been pushed back several times, and is now uncertain. Several of the underground portions of the project are near completion and the MTA requested bids for the last several pieces of the project in 2007, including the glass dome and the remaining underground work. However, when bids were due in early 2008, only one bid was received, which was more than double what the agency had anticipated. The MTA rejected the bid, and MTA CEO Lee Sander ordered a review of the project to identify where the budget could be scaled back and how the MTA could contain costs. Likely outcomes of this re-evaluation include an issuance of several RFP’s that break the remaining tasks into smaller projects as well as scaling back of the grand design plans for the above ground station building.

However, many in Lower Manhattan are not happy with discussions of scaling back the Fulton Street station. Groups such as the Alliance for Downtown New York and Manhattan’s Community Board 1 are urging the MTA to fulfill its promise to deliver a world class transit center to Lower Manhattan. They claim that the region needs the facility in order to remain economically competitive. In addition, many believe that the MTA needs to build a grand transit center since that was the promise made to Lower Manhattan, which has had to deal with several years of construction impacts, a large vacant plot of land, and several condemnations. For his part, Sander has stated that the MTA is committed to the Fulton Street center and that stopping work on the project is not an option. While plans may have to be scaled back or slightly delayed, Sander has stated that he is not in favor of stopping work on the project.